


The Marlows and the Flight of the Heron

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Drabble Sequence, Drabbles, Gen, Post-Canon, Quintuple Drabble, Scotland
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-14 07:15:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16035590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: On a holiday to the Highlands, the Marlows visit Culloden.





	1. Giles

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [antonia_forest_fanworks_2018](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/antonia_forest_fanworks_2018) collection. 



58865  
59042

177 miles round trip: 3h16 out, 3h57 return. Detour Inverness petrol, halt between Invergarry & Laggan for L to puke, spectacular.

avg. 19 mpg, n.b.g. 

Gen. Wade’s roads undeniably impressive engineering, tho’ nothing the Romans didn’t do 1700 years before in England! Battlefield just bog really. Small museum, cdnt raise enthusiasm for coins, claymores & keepsakes. Views on Loch Ness okay, prefer this neck of wds.

petrol 18/8  
museum tickets 1/  
ices x 5 (A paid own) 10d  
fish & chips do 6/3  
single malt 7/6 (morale at critical low)

~~What a waste of fucking time~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gen. Wade's roads: the network of military roads constructed in Scotland by General George Wade to maintain Hanoverian dominance after the '15.


	2. Ann

...I’m trying to see it as at least as much a matter of rebuilding trust between us as me learning to forgive them. It’s hard sometimes, though. 

Successes: holding my tongue when Nick got all worked up about the heron (it makes me crawly all over when she doesn’t distinguish between books and reality), helping Lal without coddling (pretended she was a dorm baby, which felt awful seeing as she’s 15 and family but it worked.) They'll both grow up eventually.

Could do better: let Giles pay for things even if I know he can’t afford it and I can.


	3. Ginty

Dear ~~Mon~~ ~~Vee~~ ~~Emma~~

Oh might as well I can hardly send it now

Darling Rupert,

We drove out today to the site upon which the last great rebellion to shake our Realm received its death-knell, ah! melancholy spot! Tho’ our antecedents of those days should doubtless have been at odds, I devoutly wished you with me, that we might pledge our friendship against that forbidding scene—

Dear Patrick,

What a shame I didn’t come here when I was the twins’ age, I felt I’d outgrown the romance somehow. Queer thing, we saw a heron behaving—DAMN IT’S NO USE


	4. Peter

Hullo Sel,

Wish you were here and all that. Actually I wouldn't inflict it on you. It’s moderately bloody, with almost the whole distaff contingent represented except for the sensible bit (unfair to Nick, you say, but just wait) and Son No.1 in a perpetual hump because he’s short of readies and the Land Rover drinks petrol like he’d like to drink whisky. Culloden today (See Overleaf). In fact got some poss. half-decent shots, including one of a heron in flight that Nick said was hijjus Ill Omen but then she inherited all the ancestral sailorly superstition.

—P.M.


	5. Lawrie

Dear Tim,

Are there any decent plays about Culloden? I know just how to do Bonny Prince Charlie, I’d be frightfully good. You could adapt The Flight of the Heron but he’s not in it much so you should write your own. I’ve 44 midge bites including 2 on the soles of my feet. I was carsick and Giles said it was a change from Nick and she huffed because she hasn’t been sick ~~since~~ for ages, Ann said it was The Suspension but I reckon I’m just nervous ahead of schedule for the acting school at Brimpton.

Love,

Lawrie


	6. Nicola

Nicola had no-one to talk to. The rest of them were all in the lounge or in their rooms writing postcards, except Giles, who was glooming over whisky and sums in the bar, where she felt rather shy of venturing. She didn’t expect she’d actually get chucked out: it was an hotel, after all, not a pub, but the Scots did seem stricter about that sort of thing. Anyway, he probably didn’t want to see her just now—it was she who had clamoured for Culloden, and Giles capitulated because, well, because in Rowan’s absence she was his favourite, there was no point in denying it to herself. And it _had_ been a lot further away than she’d imagined; there really _hadn’t_ been much to see, just a small exhibit in a cottage, a Victorian cairn with a florid tribute to Highland gallantry, and a haunted, brown-toned stillness.

Ann had exclaimed, ‘Oh, but it’s a grave!’ to which Giles replied, ‘Per cubic foot, there are probably more bones in Westbridge churchyard,’ which was taking being sensible a bit far, even for Giles: it did matter that they’d all been laid there at the same time, and been killed. 

And then the heron, a grey and white ghost rising from a spot where they hadn’t even seen there was a clogged pond, so close that Nicola felt the air displaced by its wings ruffle her hair. 

She could see Ann itching to say it wasn’t _healthy_ , at Nicola’s age, to take stories so seriously. It _was_ probably a bit feeble of her—as Ginty scornfully pointed out, the moment in the novel happened on Loch Lochy, not Culloden. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that something had _begun_. Not that she was going to meet a tall, handsome, red-haired Highlander with whom her destiny was inextricably entwined, and which would end in her—she gulped. Just that the world had rearranged itself, as it did when she felt the blast wave caused by Jon’s crash. Except that had been a real thing, not a feeling. Nor was it like the sense of foreboding that she’d had upon seeing Foley, about the Gondal, or Rose’s disappearance. And often enough, too, things blew up out of nowhere, without the slightest premonition—all the huhas at school, for example. She’d just appreciate someone to thrash it out with, and every possible candidate—Patrick, Miranda, Rowan—was disqualified in some way. 

She couldn’t mooch in the lobby all evening, though—the winged chair she was curled in concealed her from the view of general passers-by, but it would take only a moment’s attention from one of the staff to notice that a teenager was cluttering up the place, and there, someone behind her had just pinged the reception bell. She should go for a walk, there was still plenty of light. She yawned, reluctantly unfurling her limbs, stood up and turned, only to look straight into the composed, observant, gently amused face of Robert Anquetil.

**Author's Note:**

> Set the summer after _Run Away Home_ , and Since the War, but on the earlier end of the timeline. Any period-detail errors are of course my own, but can Watsonianly be attributed to the slight AU that the Marlows inhabit.
> 
> Nicola and Lawrie canonically read _The Flight of the Heron_ , D.K. Broster's popular novel about the '45. You don't really have to know anything about it for this story except that it deals with the friendship between an English officer and a Jacobite Highlander, and their destiny-laden romance begins when the Englishman's horse is startled by a heron, injuring him.
> 
> It's a tidy step from Glencoe, where Forest holidayed and considered setting another Marlows book, to Culloden, but Your Author was in those parts this summer, and has never stopped any time in Glencoe, so. There's a large interpretive centre at Culloden now, but the battlefield retains some of that haunted quality.


End file.
